Welcome to the Short Stack, our regular feature where we search for the most intriguing OpenStack news. These links may come from traditional publications or company blogs, but if it’s about OpenStack, we’ll find the best ones.

At this week’s OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, it was clear that OpenStack has matured a great deal over the past 6 years and 14 releases. Frederic Lardinois noted the increasing scale of the software and usage by major enterprises such as Comcast, PayPal, andAT&T among many others. Lardinois acknowledged that while most of the insecurity around OpenStack adoption is gone, some still lingers.

Over the past several years, the OpenStack community has made interoperability, the option of mixing and matching platforms from multiple vendors, a key goal for the project. On Wednesday at the OpenStack Summit, eighteen members of the OpenStack platform announced their success by demonstrating the ability to run OpenStack deployments across on-premises, public and hybrid clouds.

Gina Longoria discussed the cost and benefits of OpenStack’s private cloud offerings versus Amazon Web Services (AWS). This ongoing debate continued at this week’s OpenStack Summit, and Longoria acknowledged benefits on both sides but also addressed the progress OpenStack has made in the last 6 years. Longoria said OpenStack has gained significant traction, and become the de facto standard for open-source based private clouds (backed by leading technology providers like Cisco, Dell, IBM, HPE, and more).

Jason Baker interviewed Victoria Martinez de la Cruz about the Women of OpenStack mentoring initiative. After getting her start in OpenStack through this mentoring program, Martinez de la Cruz presented this past week at the OpenStack Summit on the mentoring program, particularly Outreachy’s efforts to pair interns with projects. Her strongest advice: mentors have a very strong role in helping interns or mentees break down cultural barriers. The results can have a lasting impact on their mentees’ career path.

This week, Red Hat released the results of a new vendor survey that revealed Cloud-native application development is among one of the major drivers of OpenStack production deployments, which more than doubled over the last year. The survey stated that 43% of those polled deployed OpenStack in production. The increase in OpenStack deployments over the last year is good news for Red Hat and others who have been attempting to address deployment troubles that may hinder adoption.